Alcohol Haze At Galactic Heart

Kentai writes: "According to the BBC: 'The detection of yet more alcohol in a giant molecular cloud near the centre of our galaxy could give clues to the origin of complex organic molecules in space.' I knew my life revolved around alcohol!"

Serious comment, trust me!!!

[hhe_hee]

Ok, here's a serious comment. This could reveal much of the mystery about our own origin. How life began in the first place in our solar system. And maybe life is forming right now far away in that cloud, think about that for a while. We could be watching the formation of life (at a great distance of course) in that cloud. It's like a giant Miller-Urey experiment [uoregon.edu] where a mixture of methane, ammonia, water vapour, and hydrogen was circulated through a liquid water solution and continuously sparked by a corona discharge elsewhere in the apparatus. The discharge may be thought to represent lightning flashes on the early Earth. After several days of exposure to sparking, the solution changed colour. Subsequent analysis indicated that several amino and hydroxy acids, intimately involved in contemporary life, had been produced by this simple procedure.

There are several key steps in the origins of life:

• Formation of complex organic molecules
• Self-replicating systems
• Protein synthesis; DNA is the genetic material, but it requires proteins to replicate
• Compartmentalization: the first cell

And origins of complex organic molecules are believed to be:

• Nucleosynthesis in stars to form complex molecules
• molecular clouds
• A very significant fraction of the Earth' s carbon came from extensive cometary bombardment on the primitive Earth